Paradise Lost and Found

                                                       

                                                  

                                                   A review by Michael Casey

 

     A guide for a tour group on the island of Maui recounted the most surprising question he had been asked. “Russ, do you ever get sick of all this beauty?”  “Sick of beauty”?  Russ responded to the query thoughtfully.  “Some people are so overwhelmed by what they see here, they have no place to put it.  And so they can’t grasp it.  They get worn out.”  The center of this reported dialogue is, of course, the outer landscape, Hawai’i’s stunning vistas.  There is not much of that kind of beauty in Kristiana Kahakauwila’s debut collection of stories, This Is Paradise.   The terrain the reader is invited to traverse is an inner landscape of relationships.  

     In six stories, most of them longish, Kahakauwila develops narratives in which individuals are often confused or disappointed by the actions and attitudes of friends and family.  The situations are etched with a sure hand and a deft stroke.  A specific notable element in the writing of these stories is the use of Hawaii pidgin.  So if you are not native Hawaiian but haole (Caucasian), you will find your vocabulary expanded.  It’s a natural métier for stories that involve identity search. And it stimulates rather than impedes the engagement of the reader.  If the context doesn’t carry the denotation, then look up the meaning.  It’s fun to do.

     What is less fun is the content of some stories.  “Wanle” is the eponymous daughter of a father devoted to cock-fighting. Her lover abhors the “sport.”  When her father dies, Wanle takes over the enterprise so that her father’s “honor” can be sustained.  Conflicts multiply.  The characters in this story are convincingly real and distinct but too much detail and description are layered on the bird fights.  The people are obscured by the foul battles of the razor equipped fowl.  I found the bird battles not only repugnant in themselves but also oddly bathetic, in that the attempt to ascribe purported cultural noblility to the combants and their handlers reaches too far.   Another problematic story is “The Road To Hana.”  While the story deals with an identity theme important to the collection as a whole—“Was local being from a place, or just of it?”—it squanders its own question when a dog appears in the road and Becky rescues him with the remark, “He’s lost.  We have to find his house.”  The parallels to the couple are too obvious.  Finally (on the weak side) is “Thirty Nine Rules For Making A Hawaiian Funeral Into A Drinking Game.”  It’s a series of jokes that take the form of “Have a Drink When . . . [a cleric or a relative] makes an easily mock-able statement.  It gets old quickly.

   The other three stories, the title tale that opens the collection and two narratives that end the book, “Portrait Of A Good Father” and “The Old Paniolo Way” are bull’s—eye works that incorporate  Kahakauwila’s skilled use of language and keen insight into young and old, adult children and relationships with fathers.  In the story “This Is Paradise” a group of young adult women, out clubbing encounters a serious misfortune that befalls one of their peers.  They are forced to unwanted reflection about danger and death.  The fathers in the latter two stories are memorable even though they are seen and heard more in the voices of others rather than through their own. 

   Kristiana Kahakauwila is an akamai young writer who will be around for a long while.  That’s a good thing for the contemporary American short story.  It will be interesting to see if Hawai’i remains at the center of her attention or if she develops other subjects and themes over time. Either way, it’s a safe bet that her talent will deepen with each new book.